The Amarok team is proud to present the second Alpha of Amarok 2.0. Development is moving at full speed and a lot of bugs have been fixed since Alpha 1, as well as features polished. Thank you to everyone who has already helped by filing bug reports and sending patches. Please keep them coming! Read the release announcement for a list of bugfixes and changes. Get Alpha 2 today and help make Amarok 2.0 rock.

Can you simply ge rid of vertical tabs and vertical texts? They are impossible to read, give a cluttered sensation and, to sum it up, are the only negative part of the Amarok experience (which is, a part from this, fantastic)

The iTunes way to do it, only one big treeView. Of course, in Amarok we have a second level of horizontal tabs inside of the first level (services, podcast and things like that). But i think that a single treeView would do the job better. Now, I am ok with the current system, but i remember when i first used Amarok (i was on XMMS before and iTunes (4.*) in wine for my iPod), i didn't liked the left tabs stuff but not at all. It was taking so many click to access playlist.

I think that there should be not more than 2 of those tabs. The default one should be the treeview with Playlists, podcast, services, devices and "see all media" and the second should be the collection, with local, remote and device in different tabs.

It sound like iTunes/RhytmBox/Other player, but it is still more usage than always having to click 5-7 time to access a basic feature.

We already tried this sort of thing before, it was really ugly (even worse then our current tabs!) and left little space for the actual browsers due to all the tabs.

The iTunes model only works because they don't have a playlist per-se, but use the playlist-space to show the collection browser normally. But then people can also make their own playlists somehow. Not sure. Anywho: the point is that iTunes tree view isn't an isolated feature, and adopting it means making Amarok cramped and ugly or becoming a complete iTunes clone.

At least provide the [b]option[/b] to use something else than vertical tabs... horizontal tabs, text, ANYTHING but vertical tabs... my neck isn't made to turn 90% (ok, a *little* less) and I'm not used to reading text that's rotated 90 degrees. At least, if you keep the tabs, make the text readable from top to bottom:

R
E
A
D
A
B
L
E

T
E
X
T

Yes yes I know you loose a lot of space this way. It's still better than text that's near impossible to read or icons that you can't tell what they do.

Personnally, i don't have any problem to read and to know what they are doing. It's better than Horyzontaly tabs, it takes less area...
And reading from top to bottom is more annoying than 90° oriented text.

But the idea to add an option to configure these tabs, for people who prefer 90° oriented text or top to bottom text, is really good.

There exist vertical tabs in many apps like Kate, KDevelop, Konqui... But Amarok uses its very own implementation since the early 1.x releases. The same about the curious selection bar in the playlist they were using. I believe it would already help if they just leave it to the Oxygen (or another) style to draw the tabs...

IMO it's the best solution, at least if we follow the "tabs" paradigm, I even did a mockup and posted it on amarok-devel but it was rejected saying that buttons may grow in number and then occupy more real estate. I don't think so, but I'm not a developer so I can't really blame them :)

Anyway - is the database structure so much different that a converter script is so difficult? I, too, am still kept off from trying Amarok2 because that would mean trashing all my album covers, playcounts, ratings and so on... would be great if a converter could be added before the final version is out!